Neoliberal University Research Articles

Solidarity as subversion: Attempting climate justice practice within the Neoliberal University

The neoliberal higher education model has often co-opted efforts from justice-based movements to disrupt academic complicity in a capitalist and colonial system of exploitation. Higher education institutions have already begun looking to, and appropriating, language and ideas from the climate justice movement to perform a response to the injustices that have led to and resulted from the climate crisis. As one way of subverting this appropriation, this article articulates, and reflects on, a specific approach to the Vertically Integrated Program (VIP) model, an educational idea originally developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology where undergraduate students work as researchers with faculty and graduate students. The approach put forth in this article is one based on the experience of the authors in developing a VIP that aims to foster and practice a culture of solidarity with an organisation that is addressing the causes and effects of historical injustices facing the community from which it grew. The practice of solidarity at a time of climate crisis offers a potential solution, showing students that it can be used to break down the walls of higher education, to practice solidarity with those excluded outside of it, and to remind us all of our humanity.

Reterritorialisation of the transformative power of self-care activities: Students’ wellness

Students including health sciences at universities that appear to subscribe to neoliberal logic are at risk for social injustices and inequalities, anxiety, depression, academic demands and unethical activities. There has been little discussion about students’ self-care and well-being in and beyond the neoliberal universities. This article explored the transformative power of self-care activities on the wellness and learning of health sciences students at a university in the Western Cape, South Africa. A qualitative exploratory-descriptive research approach was conducted with 10 health sciences students purposively recruited from a South African university. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed thematically. Three themes identified from the analysis were: students’ understanding of self-care, engagement in self-care activities and the transformative power of self-care activities. The key barriers to engagement in self-care activities were academic demands and unsafe environments; however, the students had to make time and effort.Contribution: This article makes several noteworthy contributions to how self-care horizontal and complicated conversations can be infused into health sciences education and work-integrated learning contexts to heal and transform the wounds of neoliberal logic at universities. Additionally, we propound the applicability of ubuntu currere (ubuntu curriculum) and wellness as liberating frameworks that can be used for reterritorialisation and reconceptualisation of self-care and well-being to cultivate health sciences students’ professional and personal development.

The ‘performative’ university: theoretical and personal reflections

ABSTRACT For centuries, universities have proliferated and flourished around the world, playing an important role in societal knowledge production and diffusion. However, in the past four decades, this old organizational form has been subjected to neoliberal, managerialist policy doctrines such as New Public Management. Following this, universities have tended to become more ‘business-like’ in their internal management and governance, with generally perceived adverse effects on the quality of academic education, research, and working conditions. These developments pose fundamental threats to academic freedom and free knowledge production and diffusion. Acknowledging various forms of academic resistance to, and coping with, these threats, the purpose of our paper is twofold. First, we adopt the concept of ‘performativity’ – hitherto researched mainly in primary and secondary schools in Anglo-Saxon contexts – to account for, and critique, neoliberal university policies, and practices in a variety of Global North settings. Second, through collaborative autoethnography, we add our own personal narratives to ‘talk back’ to managerialism.

A Reparative Lens for Exploring Youth Aspirations in South African Universities

ABSTRACT In South Africa, low-income rural black youth are assumed to exhibit endurance in their higher education agency while yet not really being agentic, because they accommodate an oppressive university and settle for less ambitious aspirational horizons. Drawing on illustrative empirical data from a longitudinal study of black youth without hot knowledge of higher education to deploy from their families’ biographies, the project explored students’ accessing, participating in and moving on from their studies at five South African universities. In exploring youth aspirations and agency, the concept of repair is employed to position aspirations as reparative and temporal where past injustices, present and future intersect in shaping agency and in projecting imagined futures for youth. The cultural lens of aspiration offers a space to interrogate and dismantle past exclusions and unsettle norms of the “disadvantaged student” to avoid reinscribing past injustice in ways which are globally relevant to marginalised university students from poor backgrounds compared to better off students. It shows how day to day negotiated conditions of living in universities by these students are agentic; enduring poverty and exclusion is an active aspirational struggle for dignity and recognition, even if these students are not able to undo relations of power. Ubuntu is mobilised as an ontological means to further deepen how we understand aspirations and agency as interdependent and interacted between person and community and as refusal of the neoliberal university. Finally, features of universities as potential spaces of aspirations and repair for transformative change and transformative futures are sketched.

Is It Lonely (T)here? Intramurals, Black (W)holes, and Black Feminism

This essay employs the autotheoretical critique of the university and celestial cartography pioneered in Evelynn Hammonds’s “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality” to understand the dynamic relationship between the silencing of black academics and black women/feminists in various sites of the neoliberal university. Narrating two experiences at Ivy League institutions, this essay meditates on the voids created and inhabited when the gravity of black study’s insistence on blackness as essential to the construction of modernity collapsed into and under the name of Afropessimism. The essay interrogates how looking for the distortion of the academic spaces that surround and engage black thought—namely, American studies, ethnic studies, and women and gender studies—renders visible (presuming we have the right instruments) the production of black (w)holes. Finally, it is interested in how the black intramural’s gender dynamics and the heteropatriarchy of its surrounds continue to silence black feminists.

Beyond tick boxes: re-imagining education for sustainable development in higher education

ABSTRACT We are in an era of climate breakdown, mass extinction and global injustice. Through analysis of the new UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) for academics, this paper explores some global challenges of incorporating Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the neoliberal university. The PSF is a globally recognised framework for professional development, yet its recent review concluded that ESD could not be included within it. The paper discusses the disconnect between the growing recognition of the need for education that responds to our planetary predicament and the particular logics and rationalities of a neoliberal framework. In its critique of the underpinning assumptions of the PSF and its wider context, it discusses (im)possibilities of values and unlearning in a performativity driven setting. Next, it provides generative provocations to those using such frameworks for their own professional development or to support the development of peers. It invites academics to find new ways of using the limits of these narrow professional development practices as prefigurative for a less disconnected university where other possibilities for responding to our planetary predicament can be imagined.

Refining the narrative: An autoethnographic insight into academic identity construction and development in a Chinese doctoral student's journey in the United States

What seems to be overlooked in current higher education research is the perspective of individual doctoral students in applied linguistics and how they comprehend the academic training culture within U.S. neoliberal universities. Through an autoethnographic (AE) approach, this study investigated how I as a Chinese doctoral student experienced different stages of identity negotiation in my doctoral program. The findings, which integrated theories of academic identity, the third space, and neoliberalism, were primarily derived from my self-reflection data throughout the pandemic. The arguments center around the coexistence of multiple identities and an asynchronous process of identity construction, which were influenced and shaped by study-work balance, laissez-faire supervision, the digital third space, and the pressures from neoliberal norms. The study brings insights into theoretical models from an AE perspective and recommends that higher education stakeholders adopt a flexible approach to doctoral supervision and academic publishing. Autoethnography offered a first-person perspective for in-depth meaning-making, facilitating a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of one’s academic journey of becoming.

A decolonial reading of Bernstein’s sociology of education in transforming the university in South Africa

In this paper, I reclaim Bernstein’s pedagogic device to think through and theorise higher education transformation and decolonisation in the global South. I am especially persuaded by Bernstein’s work on the pedagogic device and the endless possibilities it provides in re-thinking the public university and what it could be. Using South Africa as a case study, I focus on the decolonial calls sparked by the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall protests in 2015/2016 around the need to critique, evaluate and dismantle the neoliberal university in South Africa. I suggest that Bernstein’s ideas of the field of production, the field of recontextualisation as well as the field of reproduction offer an intersectional, and dialectically useful, lens in making epistemic, ontological and methodological intervention(s) in transforming the university in South Africa. I end the paper with some concluding remarks on the discursive usefulness of Bernstein’s work in transforming the public university in the global South.

Decoding South African lecturers’ frustrations with neoliberal governance approaches

Corporate norms and values, characterised by an enterprise ethos, became the new parameters that defined the academic environment. Academics are increasingly becoming concerned about the commodification of higher education and its impact on academic quality and the standards of quality graduates. The voices of South African academics and their experiences within the neoliberal university governance remain underexplored in the current literature. This study aimed to enhance understanding and contribute to knowledge by exploring lecturers’ experiences within a corporatised academic work environment. This study took place across public and private higher education institutions in South Africa. A cross-sectional, qualitative, interpretative phenomenological research design was employed. Data was collected by means of semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of 20 lecturers. The data analysis followed the principles of interpretative phenomenological analysis. The findings of the study identified three key areas that triggered feelings of frustration with management: (1) participants experienced a lack of management’s understanding of governing academic work environments, (2) an erosion of their collegial culture, and (3) a lack of transparent communication.Contribution: A key contribution of this study, which set it apart from other studies, was lecturers’ perceptions that their professional identity, collegiality, autonomy, and academic freedom were in crisis.

Dear vulnerability … writing toget-her to escape and resist the neoliberal university

ABSTRACT I am lost. My writing is lost. I feel isolated, under pressure, trapped in a cage. My writing is measured and molded, suffocating in a corset of norms and expectations in the neoliberal university. In a collective diary, I can share my experiences, ponder on my feelings. I breathe, I survive, I resist. And as I write, I open up. As I write, I find myself, I find ot-hers. Through my words, sentences, and pages, I embrace my vulnerabilities: insecurity, courage, relating, becoming. I write collectively, stronger toget-her. I write to offer new understandings, to change and resist the neoliberal university. Will you join me?

Proverbial teachings on sustainability: critical dialogues on traditional proverbs and zine-making in higher education

ABSTRACT What ethical and political considerations does zine-making raise in teaching and learning across knowledge systems and artful expression? This question guides the critical dialogue about a research project on teaching sustainability through traditional proverbs from Malaysia and Kazakhstan within a zine-making workshop in a UK university. Merging our reflections with that of students and their zine artworks alongside traditional proverbs, we dialogue across two tensions associated with the challenges of proverbial learning as decolonial connections or appropriation, and the politics and pedagogy of zine-making. Through these tensions which reveal the messy, ambivalent, and unsettled practices within the neoliberal university, we offer some reflections for researchers and teachers engaging in decolonial and arts-based praxis.

Re-learning hope: On alienation, theory and the ‘death’ of universities

Informed by Irving Horowitz’s view of the Festschrift, this article adopts both a retrospective and a prospective approach to the work of the sociologist Bridget Fowler. On the one hand, it assesses some of the key characteristics and contributions of her three single-authored books: The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century (1991), Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory (1997) and The Obituary as Collective Memory (2007). On the other, it takes cues from these books to develop a more forward-looking type of reflection that connects some recent sociological and anthropological research on ‘the neoliberal university’ to writing about hope and utopia. The article emphasises that Fowler is attentive not only to processes of social reproduction but also to what John Holloway terms ‘cracks in the texture of domination’, that is, to examples of freedom, resistance and the imagination of alternatives in popular culture and elsewhere. At the same time, it shows how thinking about utopia and hope can contribute to debates about ‘the alienated academic’ and the ‘death’ of universities. The article concludes that Fowler’s sociology is, alongside its many other qualities, a valuable contribution to ‘re-learning hope’, arguably one of the most important challenges facing us today.

Memória, discurso e universo acadêmico

This article analyzes the situation, aiming to inaugurate reflections on the following questions: under what vital conditions is knowledge produced in the space-time of neoliberal universities; whether there is gender inequality in these conditions; how it is felt and experienced by bodies that accumulate multiple exclusions; what socio-epistemological consequences this entails; and how to resist and act to reverse this situation. The method used is to review bibliographic and information sources. As a result, the article makes the first movement of articulation and systematization of statements. They are precariousness, acceleration, suffering, gender blindness, substantive (in)equality, epistemic violence, feminist epistemology, social memory and French discourse analysis. In a detailed and sustained manner, the conclusion presents the guidelines for carrying out future empirical studies.

Globalization, Competition and the Transformation of German Universities since the 1970s

Abstract Responding to the perceived challenges of globalization, German politicians have sought to transform German universities into competitive ‘entrepreneurial universities’. Based on archival material from six German universities, this article shows how reforms of university governance and new modes of funding have changed power relations within universities as well as within the German scientific community. Even though the breakthrough of ‘New Public Management’ must be situated in the 1990s, some causes of these transformations can be traced back to the 1970s, when the end of the postwar boom, educational expansion and discontent with the democratization of universities gave rise to new visions of the university’s role in society. Even though neoliberal ideas did play a part in the transformation of German universities, this process was more complex than the often-used label ‘neoliberal university’ suggests. International comparisons are applied to assess the scope of change and to highlight some of the peculiarities of the German developments.

Feminist Praxis in Exile

This work is a collaborative attempt to historicize our experience as feminist academics in neoliberal settings across different countries (Turkey, Canada, the United States) in the last two decades. We narrate how we learned to act as women academics in certain male and nationalist and/or racialized settings in neoliberal moment(s). We refrain from victimhood accounts as well as the charm of heroic feminist stances. We tell our stories in terms of our relations to the socio-economic contexts that host neoliberal universities, to our presence on neoliberal campuses, to the academic circles that we happen to join, and from which we are excluded

Reclaiming the Public University: What Role for Higher Education Workers and Trade Unions?

Industrial action in the UK higher education sector since 2018 has shone a light on the multiple crises that impact the system. Universities had already been badly affected by the imposition of a tuition fee funding model and aggressive marketisation, but increasingly find themselves at the centre of the new culture wars. There is growing state interest in the activities of academics and interventions into actions on university campuses. In an age of colliding crises, the traditional role of the public university is increasingly being questioned. In recent years these developments have been paralleled by industrial action by the University and College Union (UCU) whose members have been in disputes with university employers over pensions, pay and working conditions. In this article I argue that this industrial action represented an important struggle over the material conditions of university workers, but it also represented a more fundamental, if often implicit, challenge to academic capitalism and the neoliberal university. However, despite an important victory in relation to pensions for workers in some universities, the outcome of the sector-wide dispute on pay and working conditions must be considered as a defeat. In the article I offer an explanation for this setback, and assess whether, and in what ways, a trade union like UCU can contribute to a radical reclaiming, and reinvention, of the public university.

Dwelling tenderly with our desires for research and the world: a collaborative and sensory methodology of hope

ABSTRACT How do we dwell tenderly in the ruins of the modern university? This paper engages a hopeful, collaborative, and sensory methodology to imagine possibilities for research and researcher. As academic women navigating the decay of the neoliberal university amid the shadowy spectre of the ‘ideal’ academic, we explore our lived experiences, identities, and questions. For us, managing modernity’s disorientation and dislocation means showing up differently, with new tools, new theoretical frames, and new ways of relating. From our experiential and aesthetic inquiry, tendrils of possibility for what research does, has been, is, and could be, are emerging. Our dwelling together (co-sensing in radical tenderness) helps us see beyond the thicket of institutional requirements towards a more hopeful and collective existence – for if the sense of separation instilled by modernity is a social disease, healing must be a communal endeavour.

Co-Constructing A Praxis for Critical Pedagogies of Care in Postdigital Tertiary Education

Like others in 2020, we found ourselves grappling with the sudden shift to fully online teaching and learning during COVID19 and the very pronounced negative impact of the sudden shift on students and faculty alike (Authors and colleague, 2022). In Aotearoa New Zealand emerging research revealed how tertiary students’ experiences of online learning during COVID19 were characterized by stress and anxiety, compounded by difficulties in communication between students, instructors, and support staff as well as by loss of income and limited access to campus resources. These challenges were even more pronounced among already marginalized students, such as Māori tertiary students. Simultaneously, messaging from ‘managers’ in our neoliberal university context was increasingly about ‘pastoral care for students,’ a message which we struggled to make sense of given the nature of the very real socio-political challenges our students faced. Confronting the uncertainties of COVID and related future crises we set out to explore how we could better plan for and accommodate increased flexibility and adaptability in instruction that is responsive to both students and current social contexts–given that, a) throughout the COVID19 pandemic, students and instructors were frequently absent due to illness even when on campus instruction resumed in New Zealand, and b) periodic lockdowns were part of the COVID19 management strategy in NZ, which meant sudden shifts to fully online instruction throughout the 2020-2022 academic years. Our premise was that the crisis required thoughtful deliberation on how we, as tertiary educators, might collectively address such a significant global challenge in our local context. We (authors) applied for and were awarded a 2-year leadership in teaching fellowship, a new fellowship program that aimed to support faculty innovation in teaching. The fellowship allowed us time to slow down and interrogate our approach to postdigital education during the period of Covid19, as well as beyond it. We sought out to ask critical questions of ourselves, such as those related to the form/manner in which we were using digital tools, what was meant by ‘pastoral care’ for students and what that should/could look like in postdigital pandemic times, questioning the discourses and aspirations around a post-pandemic ‘return to normal’.

Towards mindful geographies

This paper proposes a mindful geography, in which mindfulness is understood as a research praxis and an alternative way to inhabit academia. Mindful geographies offer a resistance to ways the neoliberal university (and the discipline of geography) impacts the minds and bodies of those marginalised by this system. Firstly, to provide context to my argument, I situate myself within the literature pertaining to mindfulness. Subsequently, this allows me to focus on the ways geographers have engaged with mindfulness through the geographies of transformation, critical geographical perspectives on mindfulness, and non-representational approaches to the practice. This review allows me to engage with critical and transformational approaches to mindfulness through the interdisciplinary literature offering alternative pathways for the practice. Towards the end of the paper, I offer a different inflection for the ways that mindfulness might be used in geography. Here, I provide an explanation of the ways we might bring mindfulness into our geographical research practices to contribute to collective and individual development and healing. This work is prompted by personal experiences in the academy and seeks to promote a more mindful approach to academic knowledge and practice, one that foregrounds (self)care and slowness in the production of geographical knowledge.

Moving between worlds: Creativity, disability and storytelling

In this essay, the author, using second person, considers the path her deaf body has taken to become a writer and an academic. She contrasts the strictures of the neoliberal university with the creativity that comes from deafness; a creativity that has fostered a generative movement between the disciplines of literary studies and creative writing. She considers the importance of combining the study of Australian literature with the study of creative writing and concludes by dwelling upon an architectural ethos that is predicated upon the care of deaf learners – DeafSpace.